Spies of the Balkans

By Alan Furst

Alan Furst has assembled the ingredients of a terrific thriller. He peoples sexy, seedy World War II-era Salonika, in Greece, with promising characters, such as a ballet school owner/British spy and a dandyish but right-thinking police commissar. They are foils for the hero, a sympathetic Greek detective who risks his life to help spirit Jews out of Berlin and into initially unaffected Hungary and neutral Turkey.

Though we're drawn into the life and streets of a Balkanish Salonika (modern Thessaloniki), Furst's characters are, unfortunately, not compelling or convincing enough to draw us deeply into his story. They seem an awkward fit with their place and time.

The disconnect is all the harsher because the story is set in Greece. In a country where table and family are principal preoccupations, protagonist Constantine Zannis has only cursory relations with both. He won't hang out in cafes and rarely visits or mentions his family. He's a loner, more James Bond than Zorba the Greek. That makes "Spies" feel like an American spy/guy novel plunked down in some random exotic country.

If, in midcentury Greece, a successful cop like Zannis reached age 40 without marrying or having children, that would be a family crisis. Acquaintances would gossip about his sexual orientation, and relatives would constantly nudge forward marriageable girls, or widows. Instead, implausibly, no one comments on Zannis' singlehood at all, while the hero dips into (successive) affairs with an English dance instructor, a Greek party girl and a power broker's wife, without a hint of internal conflict or social disapproval. Never!

And though Greek social and business life is punctuated with eating and drinking, the characters in "Spies" behave like WASPs. We're rarely treated to a satisfying table or even cafe scene; the few times we're in restaurants, there seems to be something wrong with the food. (One of my favorite lines: "He was ready to shoot his way out of this restaurant, but not at all prepared for sauerkraut.")

We're denied the pleasure of deals struck over ouzo or roast lamb, of savoring coffee, of relishing conversation, lament, argument, song. No men come to understandings over memorable meals. Romances aren't nurtured over custard pastries or jams or drinks, but in airfields and iffy hotel rooms. Rather Zannis, after losing his girlfriend, is "feeling the absence of a love affair," not desire for any particular woman. How, I kept wondering, could such a cold person care about European Jews he's never met, to the point of risking his life to save them?

His project distracts us from what would otherwise be a more plausible narrative: the defense of Greece against impending German invasion.

The story might have easily focused on the fight to save homeland or family, or consideration of escape. But we rarely hear Zannis in nationalistic mode; the closest he comes is a kind of stoicism that suggests he'll stand his ground in Greece to the end.

The detective taps his mentor, city Police Commissioner Vangelis, for secret funds that Zannis uses to pay off corrupt German and Turkish officials, and a Hungarian mobster, to procure fake papers for German Jews fleeing into safer countries.

Salonika had a large Jewish population in the 19th century; in the interwar years, Jews still made up about 20 percent of the city's population. Wouldn't Detective Zannis have focused first on helping them escape? Or might Zannis himself have been Jewish?

The story ends in April 1941, as the Nazis are closing in on Greece. There's an epigraph suggesting that two sisters Zannis helped had arrived safely in the United States. But over the subsequent two years, almost all of Salonika's 50,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps and exterminated in the gas chambers. We aren't given so much as a hint of this horror. We deserved to know.